Meta

My answer to the question that, ‘What is the point of engaging in a philosophical conversation?’ has always been “None!” At least to me. Most questions that make any difference to me are asked outside of philosophy, mostly in different sciences who, themselves, are born out of philosophy.

Given that, I have always been curious as for why people ask questions in a philosophy community. What do you want to know?

If it matters, it is most probably being investigated in sciences. If it is not, it most probably does not matter.read more...

The book I have worked on for the past three years is finally finished and ready for order. You can find it here.

It was a journey! From start to finish, everything is done by myself and my partner (she created the gorgeous cover and the logo for Bright Press. She also proofread the book for me).

A similar work has always been on my mind for many years. With ignosticism turning to my main focus for the past three years, I found myself in need of a reference framework for the concepts discussed in ignosticism. However, there were none. Nothing philosophical enough at least.read more...

[…] My entire life and work has been based on logic, analysis and systems. Everything was centered around processes in my head. Got me and the World nowhere. For the last part of my journey I am going to follow my heart for a change and see what happens. […] Scientific belief is a nice crutch to hang on to but […].

If westerners’ knowledge of the Christian faith is of any indication, then we don’t know anything about Islam. Most educated people in west don’t know anything about Christianity in spite of the fact that many of them are Christians, go to churches, and pray. If Christians who practice it do not have any clear idea about what it is that they are practicing, if most of them are completely illiterate in regards to their faith, what is in the Bible, and what Christianity teaches, then how do you expect them to know anything about Islam?read more...

2- Use the software inside the zip archive to convert your Zarnegar files to RTF or HTML

3- The converter keeps the line-breaks of the original Zarnegar file by using soft return in Word. It can be edited out with finding and replacing all instances of ^l with blank (^l is a regular expression. So, make sure that the option for “Regular expressions” is checked in your find-and-replace dialogue box. Use \n in LibreOffice and OpenOffice instead).read more...

Vancouver is the city that hosts countless ugly sculptures and I am going to prove it to you in here.

I live in Vancouver since 2004. I love the city, the people, and the culture. The city is certainly not amongst the richest of cities in Canada. It is actually a poor city by many standards. The economy is terrible (has been terrible since I can remember), the businesses cannot survive their first two to three years of operation and close done left and right. The minimum wage is half as much as is needed to barely survive, and the city does not look healthy by the look of its tens of pan-handlers, beggars, wandering, mentally ill, homeless people, the Hastings’ front view, or any other measure you might want to take into account.read more...

Without net neutrality ISPs will have enormous incentives to keep regular customers hostage until they pay up higher fees to access the Internet; that is to say: pay a higher fee or suffer.

If a pay-to-play Internet becomes reality, most of us will left behind while the money-cow moves to the more expensive plans and packages offered by ISPs. ISPs will start to favour them and neglect the rest of us who might not be able to afford the new fees. So, inadvertently it shifts the ISPs away from net neutrality into a discriminating Internet.read more...

Note: This is written by an atheist for other atheists. You can rarely (if at all) convince a believer by an approach like this. Please don’t use this tone when conversing with your believer friends. It will not work.

Any believer I have ever seen so far, without a single exception, have had a moral standard that has been at best equal to the lowest moral standards I keep seeing in non-believers, and at worse a degree of magnitude lower.

That does not prove anything of course. That is a personal observation and can be biased. Although the number of believers and non-believers I have seen is large, still someone can object to the sample being non-representative of the actual population. That can very well be the case.read more...

mythology
astrology and humanity’s spiritual relationship to the stars
the soul and God’s judgement on the soul
reincarnation
supernatural beings such as angels and demons
Plato wrote about all of those things.

Plato is particularly one of the worst examples one could have come up with to justify a position against my stance. If by that example she means that we have to study poetry, astrology, music, mathematics, mythology, reincarnation, demonology, the judgement day and the like because Plato has done so, then that’s not reasonable.read more...

I am sure the reason you accept the validity of the Law of Noncontradiction (I would call it the law from now on) is not because you have faith in it. It does not even make sense to say that one has faith in the law.

Also, the law is not like physical laws or language laws, or social laws. Certainly we all understand it. But, I have to emphasize on this reality a bit further for my sake.

Laws of physics are called law and they are known to be established facts about the universe. However, they are contingent. There is nothing in the fabric of the universe that necessitates this set of laws over any other conceivable laws. Not a thing. They just happened to be how they are. They very well could have been different and no violation on anything would have happened had they been different. So, the laws of physics are contingent. One way to know it is to imagine universes with different laws and see ig such imaginations ask for assumptions that might be inconceivable to be true. People have done so, and they have discovered that all of “the laws of physics” can be different without talking about anything inconceivable.
read more...

Religions are false alright,
but why can’t believers see it?

My point was rather that you seem settled on the fact that God doesn’t exist. Fine. We can debate that for years and probably not get anywhere (but who knows?). What I find surprising though is that, given that there are so many intelligent and thinking people who do believe in God, why you would trust your conclusion that they are all insane (famous or otherwise) uncritically. You might be right (I am not the guardian of truth) but we aren’t insane because we hold wrong beliefs. I read your posts with interest and I don’t find them convincing at all. This is not because I am insane!read more...